Do you know ,Chatbots are the latest and hottest topic and the newest way to engage your customers , employee or partner through messaging apps.

This is one of the most interesting sessions that I attended on the first day of Oracle OpenWorld 2017 and there this post will help to share more insights on Chat bot and thus Oracle’s intelligent Bots.

As per Wikipedia ,A chatbot (also chatterbot, chatterbox) is a computer program which attempts to maintain a conversation with a personA Chatbot or Bot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. End users can easily discover and connect to Chatbots through many of the popular messaging apps, without the need to individually download and install them from an App store.

This gives Bots a distinct advantage over device-resident Mobile Apps in many circumstances. With a Bot, your service can be instantly available through a messaging app the user already has installed on their mobile device.

An Intelligent Bot, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) dramatically improves the conversational experience, allowing a far more natural conversation between the Bot and the end user. However it is expressed and respond accordingly. Intelligent Bots will ensure your users keep engaging and coming back to your service.

Oracle Intelligent Bots: Key Components

With Oracle Intelligent Bots, an integrated feature of Oracle Mobile Cloud, Enterprise, you can develop Intelligent Bots that can create a more natural conversational user interface, through text or speech, to your enterprise systems.

Pre-Integrated Delivery Across Channels - This is for APIs for integration with Instant Apps and channels, dialog builder, human-handoff framework

By using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) powered by Neural Networks and Machine Learning, Oracle Intelligent Bots can more easily detect what the user is trying to achieve (their intent) and respond appropriately with information or results of transactions from API connections to any of your back-end enterprise applications and information sources.

The platform makes it simple and easy to build and train Intelligent Bots without the need for specialist AI skills.

Your bots can then be exposed through many Chat and Voice channels, a custom mobile app or even your web site.

Oracle Intelligent Bots has the following 4 components

Oracle Intelligent Bots has everything that customers need to build a chatbot with channel integration, dialog flow, AI engine, integration and an easy to use Bot builder UI that brings this all together. Oracle Intelligent Bots provides you with a solution that is predictable in terms of cost, ease of use, level of effort and with a rapid time to market.

Looking at the architecture, the Oracle Intelligent Bot supports a clear separation between Interacting with the channels (Facebook, etc.), the actual Intelligence, dealing with providing an answers, and the Integration with backend systems.

Fig 1: Chatbot architecture layering

But above all, it provides you with a solution that can enable you to deliver the next generation of customer engagement

Channel configurator that abstracts the communication and UI/UX aspects of the end channel.

Here end users have a choice of messaging channels they prefer to use. Certain geographies have specific channels as their preferred messaging channel while other geographies
prefer other messaging channels. There are different categories of channels as well.
Broadly, these can be categorized as follows:

Voice Based Input : Custom devices or apps with interfaces that use Siri, Cortana, Google Voice or other speech input for interaction.

Dialog flow execution – the heart of the Intelligent Bots is a state machine that executes context driven workflow with scoped variables. One of the differentiators with Oracle’s Intelligent Bots is that the AI components of NLP and Machine learning are part of this state flow engine as opposed to a separate black box which makes it very simple and easy for the Bot developer to model a conversation without having to worry about the state engine and the AI algorithms

AI Engine – Here active machine learning that identifies the intent of the conversations from the end user and extract entities from unstructured data to create a structure ‘query’ to get data from the enterprise and respond back.

Components. This is final building block of the Bot builder are the components. These are typically enterprise backend systems that own customer’s banking information, or employee information in a HCM system, or sales information in a Sales CRM system.

There are system components that handle things like message channel visualization and custom components that provide integration to mobile cloud service to reuse APIs that have been created for the mobile channel.